Introducing Conceptual Grammar

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The author was sponsored by the Institute of International Education on an ITT-fellowship.This paper contains an informal and sketchy overview of a new way of thinking about linguistics and linguistic processing known as conceptual grammar. Some ideas are presented on what kind of knowledge is involved in a natural language, how this knowledge is organized and represented and how it is activated and acquired.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Institute of International Education on an ITT-fellowshi

Social learning and verbal communication with humanoid robots

Trabajo presentado a la IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, celebrada en New York (US) en 2001.The paper discusses issues in the design of openended and grounded communication with humanoid robots. A number of design principles and design maxims are proposed. The key idea of the paper is that social learning can play a crucial role in bootstrapping a humanoid robot into lnguistic culture.N

A case study in the behavior-oriented design of autonomous agents

Trabajo presentado a la 3rd International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB), celebrada en Brighton (Inglaterra) del 8 al 12 de 1994.The paper documents a case study in the design and implementation of a robotic multi-agent system. It illustrates known design guidelines, namely that the physics of the environment must be exploited, that behavior is the result from the interaction dynamics between the agent and the environment, and that emergent behavior can and must be utilised whenever possible. But the case study also challenges certain views, such as the subsumption architecture, the need for an action selection mechanism, the goal-oriented design methodology dominating the literature on planning, and the algorithmic style of writing control programs. Alternatives are explored in the form of a cooperative, parallel, behavior-oriented design.Research has been funded by the ESPRIT basic research project SUBSYM particularly some of the early hardware development, and by the Belgian Government IUAP Centre of Excellence grant to the VUB AI lab.N

A self-organizing spatial vocabulary

Language is a shared set of conventions for mapping meanings to utterances. This paper explores self-organization as the primary mechanism for the formation of a vocabulary. It reports on a computational experiment in which a group of distributed agents develop ways to identify each other using names or spatial descriptions. It is also shown that the proposed mechanism copes with the acquisition of an existing vocabulary by new agents entering the community and with an expansion of the set of meanings.The research and writing of this paper has been financed by the Belgian Federal government FKFO project on emergent functionality (FKFO contract no. G.0014.95) and the IUAP >Construct> Project (no. 20) of the Belgian government, with additional support from the external researcher program of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo.Peer Reviewe

Frame-Based Knowledge Representation

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The author was sponsored by the Institute of International Education on an ITT-fellowship.The paper introduces a language for representing knowledge in a declarative form. With this language it is possible to define knowledge about a certain domain by introducing a number of concepts and by specifying their interrelations. The paper is meant to be an informal introduction to the language. We present the available constructs, describe their meaning and present a number of examples. In other papers (currently in preparation) we will give a formal semantics of the language, introduce the interference theory and discuss a possible procedural embedding.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Institute of International Educatio

Descriptions as constraints in object-oriented representation

Trabajo presentado al 8th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) celebrado en Karlsruhe (Alemania) del 8 al 12 de agosto de 1983.A motivation is given to introduce indefinite descriptions. Parts of a description language are presented. Mechanisms for the interpretation of indefinite descriptions are briefly discussed .Peer reviewe